Strive for Virtual Centricity in Your Business Database Designs

Virtual centricity is a concept that places business data at the center of your database design efforts and forces your application requirements into the role of becoming the embedded reality of your operational software.

This is accomplished by setting up an articulate plan that allows for scripting of database mappings between XML tags and function pointers to the relevant Read-Write routines found in the XML code that acts as a glue holding the syntax in a pattern suited for business semantics.

An XML-based architecture fits into a real-time operating system as the embedded requirements of a business application.

The real-time operating system provides the business application with low-level services such as memory allocation, network services (TCP/IP), and semaphores.

The business application software provides the system with its unique value, the device's "reason for being." In the business code, there is assumed to be an autoresponder agent-either developed in-house or purchased commercially. In addition, there is a set of management information objects which access the device data for management via the autoresponder.

The XML embedded software consists of a series of wrapper routines (scripted tagged-access methods) for the requirements data found in the business software.

Lastly, since there are as many different ways of representing data as there are individual developers and designers, a viable Web-based management solution needs the data access written in a special format that it can understand. This special format is an agile business-centric perspective referred to as virtual centricity.

Some common characteristics regarding the virtual centricity include the following factors that must be written into the syntax of the software and tightly mapped into a pattern of named-tags associated with the XML tree structure and corresponding database.

1. Recognition of the facts that data flows in from one or more sources while some data is static and stored, but other data is dynamic and accessed in different ways.

2. Data needs to be ordered and structured while at the same time needs to be handled dynamically as it is filtered from one system to another

3. These dynamic requirements of data must be integrated and shared across multiple tables or applications (or both) and concurrently may need to be stored in different storage media internal and external to the operational platform.

4. Provide a tracking sub-system to monitor the amount of data to be managed as it grows in both size and complexity.

5. Consider the facts that data can be large while the devices operating on that data can have limited system resources (usually for cost reasons).

Once all of these considerations are carefully addressed and embedded semantically into the design syntax, your business objectives should be fully realized.